Saturday, 12 November 2016

(Soft) Power is slowly changing hands.

If you had a board meeting and you had a new CEO, who was known to be a good guy, some of the change might be subtle. Some of the changes might be that people at this meeting simply hide ideas that are psychopathic. 'I'll just put this one on the shelf'! They will take a different tack to the one they would if a sociopathic CEO was the new person. They will suggest the good ideas that help everyone more.

And sure enough little evidences of small changes are happening. Although I have previously written about some of these, I have written before about organisations who have met bad fortune going against the tide, what is becoming obvious now is that there are some that are changing their behaviours to match it:

(This article actually says that Britain is rejecting the EU army, but this narrative backed by the soon to be President of the United states is relevant and strengthens that argument.)

Meanwhile, here is an article by an organisation that is PRETENDING to throw in the towel and stop being an asshole but in fact are not, but the fact they are under enough pressure that they have to pretend is interesting:

... despite the tacit admission of its failure to account for Trump's "stunning" victory, in the same letter Sulzberger also writes that "we believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign."

No, you did not: you were too worried about losing your advertisers who would complain loudly, and threaten to pull their revenue, if they saw even implicit criticism of Hillary Clinton, which meant non stop explicit criticism of Trump. So why bring it up? Because speaking of the all important top-line, the NYT - already suffering from a collapse in ad revenue - which plunged 18.5% in Q3, desperately needs subscribers to keep paying for its disinformation or else the very future of the NYT is in danger.

(One edit for spelling, links and emphasis removed)

What will happen I wonder when the first big media organisation starts to go under?

Reading this starts to bring me to something else I have been thinking for a while. Something that I keep ignoring as a silly idea but that keeps returning.

I have often imagined that these people know that they are the bad guys, know that they are speaking absolute crap in return for money or whatever it may be.

But the more they talk from their position, the less sure I am of that. While I have no doubt that there are some people who understand fully the real situation, there seems to be people, like the CEO of Grubhub, that genuinely believe what they are saying, consider this:

In such a meeting, hegemonic, colonial, and superior attitudes are completely absent; and you start to remember how hateful the racist approach present in meetings with Westerners, which demands you to prove your innocence at every juncture, thus robbing you of your humanity and your right to be treated equal, which should have been a nonissue in the first place.

(My emphasis).

This is from a woman dealing with people that are genuinely racist, often war criminals who worship Satan. But in a small way I have experienced this dislike.

I will explain a similar situation in my life and bring it back to the main point. Previously I have written before about my long period unemployed.

During this time I had numerous meetings with 'job advisers'. I will stress that this was not true of all the advisers, BUT, I experienced an aggressive dislike from them of me that did not seem to have a rational basis.

One time I went into the jobcenter and she was not ready so I had to wait, so I sat down, in the sofa provided where people would normally sit down while they are waiting... (?) It made the jobcenter woman annoyed though so she told me I had to go and search for jobs rather than wait. I asked her 'what? for 3 minutes.' She wanted me gone though so I went to the computers as she requested. I only just logged on and she came and took me off. The 3 minutes were up.

This sounds a small thing but there were many things that backed up that this was her mindset. Such as trying to get me to repeat a course I had already done. When I sat down her anger was simply as though she could not stand me and hated the fact that I was sitting 'anywhere'. That I even existed.

This is a strange hatred and one that has come to me from other areas.

The thing that gets me is this hatred has no function. With the Syrian woman above, if you were trying to convince her to follow your political goals... Why bother with the racism unless you ACTUALLY BELIEVED IT. Surely it would be easier to A) Charm or B) Threaten the person, rather than bother trying to tell them they are 'guilty' of anything. Simply: If you don't do 'x' I will kill your family... Simple as... not 'you're a sinful toad and must do what I say because of that'... That is a stupid and self destructive way of influencing.

This seems like a small point, that some of these people actually believe their garbage, but it is an important one... No?

To end this post, there is one other small way in which power is moving around the chessboard, the British politician that has gained incredibly in terms of influence in the Trump victory is Nigel Farage: